Unboxious

Spanish was mandatory for my for 3 years of elementary school and 3 years of middle school. I came out of that without even the requisite knowledge for forming basic sentences. My high school German classes were better, but only a little better. It takes a ton of self-study to really learn a language rather than just passing classes.

That said, I agree that she could probably get into Stanford and it probably wouldn’t be as difficult for her as she supposes. She is portrayed as a genius specifically with languages that one time with the French exchange students after all.

I assume this is because it’s more difficult to get in if you aren’t American and English isn’t even your first language. You know how Japanese is considered one of the most difficult languages for a native English speaker to learn? Well it goes both ways; English is just as alien to them as Japanese is to us - and college entrance applications typically have essay questions.

I love the freak that is Sadamune. He’s such a weirdo, and the anime is portraying that perfectly. As I recall from having read the manga, there are many such freaks waiting for us in the future. Lots to look forward to.

Not sure what Eminence in Shadow has to do with romcoms, but I enjoyed both 100 Girlfriends and the Eminence in Shadow manga.

I’m using AL-chan, which is a frontend for anilist.co. Of course, there are various other frontends available, including just using anilist itself directly.

My biggest gripe is it doesn’t let you know when new episodes are out for anime you’re watching

AL-chan does this

I also don’t like the numbering system for watched episodes - it starts at zero instead of one so it shows the last episode you watched vs the next episode you should be watching.( It’s relatively minor I know but that’s how I prefer my show tracking)

I’m guessing you’ll have a hard time finding an app that displays the number of episodes you’ve seen +1 instead of just showing the number of episodes you’ve seen. As far as I know, AL-chan can’t be configured to do this.

Features it does have that I need are displaying English titles

This is configurable

the ability to rank series (even if it’s just locally).

No problems there either

Not everyone online grew up with English as their first language so it’s best to not be a pedant.

The last two episodes have been incredible.

There are some crazy choices here. I’m not sure I’d call any of the anime listed here perfect, but Death Note? Really? A show which people generally agree falls off after the first half?

TBH I suspect Frieren is going to have that same issue unfortunately. Reading the manga has given me a strong impression that the author has no idea what they’re writing and is just coming up with it as they go. I don’t expect Season 3 to be as well-received as 1 & 2 were.

Nippon Sangoku had incredible art, and incredibly one-dimensional characters. Maybe this author found its political storyline fascinating; I’d say if you want that you’d be better-off watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

Even most One Piece fans will admit the anime has horrible pacing at times.

I could probably go on, but I’ll refrain.

The Elusive Samurai’s first ED was incredible.

I was having a grand ol’ time at Open Sauce last week, but today I’ve finally gotten caught up on some stuff:

• Daemons of the Shadow Realm continues to absolutely kill it. The FMA reference in last week’s episode was executed perfectly.
• You and I Are Polar Opposites continues to be cute as hell.
• The Ghost in the Shell’s first episode got my hopes up. Today I watched episodes 2 and 3 and now I’m just happy that I live in a world where this adaptation exists. Truly excellent
• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really Really Really Really REALLY Love You just released two absolutely hilarious episodes in a row. I can’t blame you if you bounced off either at the title or at one of the more controversial girlfriends, but I can say you’re missing out.
• Jaadugar is unfortunately something I still need to get caught up on. It’ll happen though!
• Kaiju Girl Caramelise is sweet, but I don’t think it quite stands up to You and I are Polar Opposites.
• The Exiled Heavy Knight bla bla bla is kind of difficult to look at because of the cinematography, but I’m pleased to report that GoHands has finally made a plot that’s merely mediocre. Their previous shows were so cringe I couldn’t last through an episode, but we have officially hit “so bad it’s good” territory (as opposed to whatever territory things like Hand Shakers and The Star Wars Holiday Special fall under)

Would be nice to have a date, but I’m glad to know it’s being worked on!

Anime is really bad at being scary, even when it’s based off a well-made horror manga. I think the only one I’ve seen that does it well is The Summer Hikaru Died.

Lol yeah, all I can think of when I look at that is “those bandages must be like two feet across or something”.

But also… a Bravern reference in 2026?! Nice taste.

I think maybe it’s assumed that a Japanese audience will already be familiar with them.

I’m liking the concept of humanity retaking earth from aliens. All that’s left is to see how well-executed it is, which I’ll admit still has me nervous.

I’m so glad Best Girl is finally here! It’s seriously worth learning Japanese just to be able to enjoy the unhinged, untranslateable way she speaks.

Not quite, but close. The problem is that a lot of these light novels originate from a web novel site where the title is the only thing users see before clicking through.

LOOK BACK always hits me right in the feels. Just a really sad story about losing a friend, and but does it do a good job of showing just how much was lost! A great watch; highly recommended if you can find 50 minutes to spare.

Anyone got the awful AI sub Amazon did? As far as I can tell it’s lost media.

Do you think Heavy Knight works as a so-bad-it’s-good title?

Finished the third season of Chihayafuru today. It was great! Chihayafuru is a sports/romance story about a girl who just wants to play karuta. Karuta is a simple game. A bunch of cards get laid on the floor between the two competitors. A poem is read, and the first player to touch the card with the corresponding poem gets rid of one of their cards. The first person to get rid of all of their cards wins. Sounds like it could get dull, but as with anything where humans are competing against one another it gets intense.

Pros:

• Insane main character. Only has a mind for karuta and breathing. TBH not super confident that she can even consistently remember to breathe.
• Fun supporting cast
• The art, voice acting, etc are all great.

Cons:

• The anime leaves off at a pretty reasonable spot, but it’s unfinished. Season 3 aired in 2019 though, so there’s still hope!
• You’ll find yourself wanting to play a card game with an incredibly high barrier to entry (memorize 100 classical Japanese poems!) which isn’t even that popular in Japan and which nobody you knows is likely to want to play.

It’s not often a protagonist actually gets into a relationship during a show’s run

It’s actually a lot more common now that it used to be. Perhaps this is selection bias, but the majority of the romance anime I’ve seen these past few years feature a relationship that starts either at the beginning of the show’s run or right in the middle (my personal favorite time for things to get real).

It goes further than that, he gave her an engagement ring! And not just a minor, but an elementary-schooler.

Image

Fun stuff; very in-character that Reigen has no idea how to do something as simple as screw something into the wall.

I wonder if it will follow a similar path to Vinland Saga, where the path to enlightenment will eventually lift the burden of the past.

Maybe. It’s not like the Mongols are gonna stop pillaging, but maybe her focus could be on helping those around her rather than enacting revenge on Mongol leadership. Of course if she did want to enact some revenge she’s in a great place to do it now.

I’m thinking Kaguya from Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Unlike most introverted protagonists, she actually tries, even if her fear and pride still cause things to advance at a slower pace than the characters might have preferred. But she tries, and her ridiculous plots are fun to watch unfold.

It’s not practical, but nothing is stopping you. I made a raid array of 1 internal SATA HDD + 1 external USB HDD of the same size once because I needed to store some data real quick before updating my NAS.

Also, with modern encoders you can fit a series on waaaaay less than half a terabyte. For example you can get the 14-episode 1st season of The Ramparts of Ice for 2.2GB. Obviously there are longer seasons than that, but we’re talking about less than 200MB per episode and with really good quality too!

Re:Zero is great but if you don’t want to watch the main character have a horrible time you probably are good to stop watching. It is definitely gonna keep happening more in the future.

Many anime viewers (understandably) complain about the results, but it’s certainly nice that amateur writers have a place to publish and read each others’ works. The normal pipeline there is that something will start as a web novel, and then if it’s really successful it’ll get picked up by a publisher like Kodansha to be sold as a light novel and then if that’s successful it’ll eventually get animated. I’m not certain how different the web novel and light novel usually are; my impression is not very! There is some editing that goes in though, and the light novels also have a bunch of included illustrations. This is both a good thing and a bad one. The web novel will usually have no art at all, just text. When those illustrations are made for the light novel adaptation, they’re locking in character designs that they’ll have to stick with later if those books ever get animated. But at the light novel stage it’s still relatively low-budget so the amount of talent and effort that goes into making those character designs usually (in my opinion) doesn’t measure up to the talent and effort that goes into making character designs for manga-original or anime-original stories. So in addition to a generic RPG fantasy world, you (often) end up with generic RPG fantasy character designs.

TBF large parts of Naruto would have benefited from quicker pacing. I expect they’ll go quite a bit further than that here though!